If frontiers could have life stories of their own and historians could write their biographies, Nianshen Song's Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 and Sören Urbansky's Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border would be part of this genre. Both books examine the history of the formation of national borders in two river basins at the intersection of three states in Northeast Asia, raising questions about the significance of border regions in the making of modern nation-states. They both decenter conventional narratives by bringing out the voices of farmers, herders, intellectuals, activists, and officials living in border areas, with a focus on interactions between different groups. However, the approaches they take in terms of source bases and analytical frameworks are notably different.
Song's book focuses on the Tumen River region located in the southeastern part of modern-day Jilin Province in China, historically at the intersection of Korea, China, colonial Japan, and Russia. Combining Qing and Chosŏn institutional histories; officials’ writings; unpublished archives held at Japanese, Korean, and Japanese institutions; and published provincial archival collections, maps, and other primary sources, Song demonstrates how nationalist narratives in Korea, Japan, and China were mutually constituted at the intersection of expansive empires and states, where local communities interacted and ideas collided. These frontier interactions were tied to international politics, group identities, and the formation of national myths rooted in the Tumen River region. The Korean communities that settled in the Tumen River region were central actors in the conceptualization of the border, as they were successively a source of political disputes between the Qing and Chosŏn, acted both as pawns and resistors to Japanese imperial policies, and constituted important agents in the competition for state building.
In chapter 1, Song situates Qing-Chosŏn disputes over Korean settlements and boundary demarcation within larger multilateral diplomatic negotiations. In the 1880s, while the Qing moved to register Korean squatters as Qing subjects as part of an “empire-wide enterprise of borderland integration” (p. 37), the Korean king insisted on strictly forbidding Korean subjects from settling north of the Tumen River. Local Koreans leveraged discrepancies in the transcription of the Manchu/Mongol term Tumen (Chinese: 土門; Korean: 豆滿), arguing that, in fact, there were two rivers, one called T'omun (土門) and the other Tuman (豆滿), and that the real boundary was the Tuman (豆滿), while the T'omun (土門) was a domestic Korean river. This debate sparked a series of territorial disputes and rounds of boundary demarcation, in which Qing and Chosŏn officials used a “hybrid” (p. 49) system incorporating Western-style diplomacy and zongfan rhetoric backed up by state-led production of geographical knowledge and maps.
Chapter 2 examines the Qing-Chosŏn boundary demarcation of 1885–87 led by the officials Yi Chung-ha and Wu Dacheng, which ultimately failed to reach a final agreement. Song's close reading of documents and maps related to this mission reinforces the idea that power structures intersected with the production of geographical knowledge, as different visions of frontiers and boundaries coexisted and influenced one another in the context of a flexible international relations framework.
Chapter 3 focuses on local society, covering issues of landownership, registration, mobility, trade, and bandits. Evocative stories and statistics depict how local populations shaped this frontier region. The example of banditry illustrates how local dynamics related to larger national issues. Armed rebel groups provided upward mobility, as some of their members were recruited into state armies, while others formed resistant militias.
In chapter 4, Song documents what he calls the “interiorization” (p. 129) of the Manchurian frontier, which was characterized by Qing attempts to implement administrative reforms aimed at expanding state capacity in response to the larger context of competition for state building among Russia, Korea, and Japan in early twentieth-century Manchuria. Those reforms entailed the creation of a civil administration departing from the banner system, the increase of troops, the regulation of settlers, and attempts to assimilate Koreans by making them adopt the Qing hairstyle. Japan also engaged in state building on the northern bank of the Tumen River as it sought to prevent the area from becoming a “hotbed for anti-Japanese activism” (p. 159). Song shows how the Japanese official Shinoda Jisaku manipulated international norms to legitimize the Japanese colonial enterprise in the Kantō 間島 region (the area north of the Tumen River, Chinese: Jiandao; Japanese: Kantō). For example, he sought to represent Kantō as a no-man's land or terra nullis (p. 159), relying on Qing Jesuit works from Jean-Baptiste Regis and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde published in 1735. Similar to the tactics employed by European colonizers in Africa, Australia, and North America, Japan invoked the terra nullis principle to justify imperial expansion and occupation.
The penultimate chapter moves to an intellectual history of the border focusing on the formation of nationalist ideologies. Early twentieth-century Manchuria became a space encapsulating “all important political imaginations in early twentieth-century East Asia” (p. 173). Drawing on writings from Japanese, Korean, and Chinese intellectuals such as Naitō Konan, Song Jiaoren, and Sin Ch'ae-ho, Song shows that while their views of the Tumen border region diverged, their narratives were mutually constituted and borrowed from each other. For example, Sin Ch'ae-ho's framework borrowed from the historical approach of the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao and the sinologist Naitō Konan's carefully studied Chinese views, including Song Jiaoren's Jiandao Issue.
In the final chapter, Song examines the formation of ethnic identity among Koreans living in the Yanbian region. Focusing on the issue of citizenship laws and naturalization, Song shows how multiple views of what it meant to be Korean were contested among Yanbian Koreans along the lines of reformism versus conservatism. Such debates alimented Korean nationalist movements that developed within educational institutions in Yanbian/Kantō. Song suggests that the March First Movement (1919), a turning point in the formation of Korean nationalism, was rooted in resistance movements in Yanbian (p. 251).
Attempting to use a similar regional focus that moves the reader away from imperial centers, Urbansky looks at the Argun River basin as a regional unit, which stretches from the intersection of Mongolia-China-Russia border triangle on the western edge, to the Hailar River on the southern edge, to the Cossack village of Olochi in the north. Adopting a longue durée approach contrasting with Song's narrow time frame, Urbansky's sweeping narrative spans the seventeenth century to the 1990s and focuses on cross-frontier encounters, migration, trade, and diplomatic exchanges. Using a quasi-encyclopedic approach that draws on a large number of mostly Russian-language sources including governmental archives, travel accounts, newspapers, propaganda images, and ethnographic surveys, the book uncovers numerous stories that paint a picture of how life at the frontier changed with shifts in political regimes. For Urbansky, the frontier changed from an abstract entity defined by treaties (Nerchinsk, 1689 and Khiakta, 1727), to a porous state border crossed by smugglers and herders (1911–1920s), to a heavily militarized barbed-wire fence that eliminated most possibilities for the movement of humans and commodities (1930s–1950s), and finally to a place of renewed trade and encounters in the 1980s.
The main contribution of the book lies in the fourth and fifth chapters, where Urbansky depicts the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict as a watershed moment in the transformation of the frontier from a site of exchange and encounters to a strictly controlled and heavily militarized zone. In chapter 4, the reader learns about large-scale migrations of Buryat herders who crossed the Argun River to flee collectivization and taxation in the Soviet Union and settled in Hulunbuir in the 1920s. Chapter 5 argues that such border-crossing along with large-scale smuggling became nearly impossible in the 1930s, as the “open steppe” came “under lock and key” (p. 150). Calling the transformation process of the border one in which “the nation-state concept of a boundary emerged triumphant” (p. 217), Urbansky's work mixes a teleological narrative centered around “a general evolution towards territorial boundaries” (p. 14) with an implied hierarchy of ethnic groups in which indigenous populations are represented as “borderless” (pp. 8, 38), relying on an “archaic economy” (p. 70), “noble savages” (p. 98) successfully tamed by Moscow (p. 143), seeing their ambitions “absorbed into the objectives of” (p. 137) larger empires, or “neutralized by the metropoles” (p. 180). Urbansky promises to offer a bottom-up perspective centered on the frontier; yet, by excluding sources produced in languages other than Russian—existing Chinese archival collections on this region are only cursorily mentioned—this work amplifies the perception of a frontier shaped by great power politics while overlooking the diversity of voices and perspectives.
In terms of audience, Song's book has much to teach to scholars of modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history, as well as researchers interested in the formation of state borders at the turn of the century. Graduate seminars would be greatly enriched by Song's book to reflect on topics such as historical methods in the field of frontier studies, critical use of multilingual sources, and deconstruction of nation-centered paradigms. Selections could also be assigned to undergraduate students in survey courses on East Asian history. Urbansky's book could satisfy the curiosity of readers interested in accounts on the Sino-Russian border.
